"free everything and not for a few days or weeks – forever"

Data scientists and data analysts as well as engineers and developers with the skills to work with big data technologies are sought after and well-compensated. IT professionals who want an extra edge looking for their next job want to be big data certified. Data and big data analytics are becoming the life's blood of business. Data scientists and analysts with expertise in the techniques required to analyze big data and engineers and developers are hard to come by. The number of big data certification courses is expanding at a rapid speed. There are a number of free or paid courses offered by several companies online. IBM is only one of them. IBM's Big Data University is  Free Online Learning with over 400,000 students. Its mission is explained as follows: "Our mission at Big Data University is to democratize access to practical skills for working with data. To do so we need to remove two big impediments: money and time. To that end, we made everything that you need to learn free. Free courses, free access to all the tools, free data – free everything and not for a few days or weeks – forever. " For several courses IBM issues IBM Open Digital Badges that can be displayed on your LinkedIn profile, your site, other social media sites, or even in your email signature. In short, you’ll have proof of your achievement in addition to gaining practical skill and self confidence. Big Data University is not an accredited institution (i.e., it does not award degrees). IBM has three versions of Big Data University, to better address the needs of the world wide audience: http://bigdatauniversity.com aims at the world at large. It primarily provides courses in English, but does have some courses in Japanese, Spanish and Russian. http://BigDataUniversity.com.br launched at the end of July 2015 for students in Brazil. It offers courses in Portuguese (so also handy for students from Portugal ) http://BigDataUniversity.com.cn launched at the end of August 2015 for students in China. It offers courses in Mandarin. The site and all of the course material are hosted in China.

What does the 2016 U.S. Government Cybersecurity Report show ?

An article from http://www.cio-today.com reports: "NASA and the U.S. Department of State were among the federal agencies that received low marks on IT security, according to a recent report card issued by the New York-based firm Security Scorecard. Also receiving low grades were the states of Connecticut, Pennsylvania and Washington. The 2016 U.S. Government Cybersecurity Report, released earlier this month, analyzed the cybersecurity vulnerabilities of some 600 local, state and federal government agencies. It found that government organizations perform poorly in information security compared to private-sector enterprises in transportation, retail, healthcare and other industries. Security Scorecard put a special focus on NASA, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Internal Revenue Service, all of which have been hit by significant data breaches this year. Across the board, government agencies struggled most with malware infections, network security and the timing of regular software patches, the report found..." Read more on >>

Box Zones targets local data storage requirements.

IBM and Box have announced  their newest product on 12 Apr 2016. Product called Box Zones enables the adoption of Box as an essential component of an enterprise content management platform in IBM Cloud data centers. IBM currently has data centers in over 17 countries in Europe and Asia. With this partnership, Box is gaining the ability to store data across Europe and Asia on IBM Cloud exercising its powerful capabilities. The partnership thus addresses local data storage requirements. "Organizations want to tap into all of the benefits of the cloud while retaining the security, performance, control and other attributes they might achieve with local data center infrastructure," said John Morris, general manager, IBM Cloud Object Storage. "With Box Zones and the IBM Cloud, enterprise customers across Europe and Asia will soon have the choice to leverage the IBM Cloud global footprint locally, and uniquely support hybrid cloud and on-premises deployments, integrating data between Box Zones and on-premises content repositories” More info on >>